Rites of Passage: The Journey to Adulthood

Fairy-tale lands where everything is perfect, make believe realms where growing up is stress-free. There is no doubt that teens nowadays believe that growing up is a walk in the park and are now taking longer and longer to take on responsibilities. Teens now believe adulthood is like a fairy-tale movie, you get lucky and then suddenly you’re rich.

Today I will be talking about a very special rite of passage. When we think of about rites of passage, most frequent concepts that come to our brain are ceremonies like birth, puberty and marriage. Rites of passage are events we encounter throughout our whole lifetime from the start to the end. These events, however, are different from initiations because an initiation is rather where you have to support yourself in order to be acknowledged, but a rite of passage is about a more individual acceptance into your own life. And in my belief the passage into adulthood is the most significant one in a person’s life. Ever since the earliest of times there has always been a line drawn between an adulthood and a childhood, they are always classified as two different types of times. Now when one thinks of the differences between an adulthood and a childhood it is near non-existence.

Most cultures we recognize these days expect a person to be a specific age before they are able to be recognised as an adult. Some separated cultures may see how well an individual performs at a particular set task before they can see them as developed men or women. Many people tend to believe that adulthood comes during the course of puberty. What I consider though my personal experience is that you turn into an adult through experiences and the understanding of life. Age doesn’t take part in a central role within determining whether you have grown up or not. But also I do believe that young adults are taking longer to mature into a fully grown adult ready to take on real life situations.

I think that our society’s associate age with growing up in years because they consider it easy assuming that a person will be able to handle certain responsibilities at a certain age and in some cases that would right, however in other cases it might be terribly wrong. In my opinion young adults are taking longer to mature this is due to the fact teenagers are shoving off adult responsibilities such as getting a job, learning to drive and being in hard working conditions more so now than any generation in the past. When comparing them to kids from the 70s, 80s and 90s, the youth of today are taking their sweet time to accomplish these tasks. I can’t believe solely that the blame on the kids, parents today view themselves as protectors rather than guides. Someplace along the track, numerous parents started accepting their task is to aid kids to mature with hardly any emotional and physical wounds as possible. They became so controlling that their kids at no time have practiced dealing with challenges on their own. Therefore, these kids have grown-up to consider they're too delicate to manage with the realities of life.

In conclusion as a society and a culture this is something that this generation’s teenage world is missing, as there is no real cultural tradition, rites or ritual in which a teenager can participate. To be reminded of their culture legacy this leads to him becoming either ignorant or completely oblivious to his culture. Now I leave with this quote from Virginia Woolf.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. - Virginia Woolf